Rough Start And Vacation Energy

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Welcome back to Corporate Strateg Strategy. Welcome back. Corporat. Strategies. Long cast. Probably in an email.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Are you I want I want everyone to know he's not having a stroke. I'm looking at his face. There's no drooping. There's no drooping that I can tell everybody on the podcast he's okay. He is okay. But I am concerned about him. That was a rough intro.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Block and block. Glorb lob. It's loblig.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

If you're watching on YouTube, if you're ever curious if he's having a stroke or not, just tune in on the YouTube. I'm sure we'll see a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

There's a stroke check. Stroke alert checker for us. Oh, goodness me.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I'm actually worried about you a little bit. Yeah. Because one, you went on vacation.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Yes. I got a little sunburned.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Two. You got a little you look good. You got some good color. A little sunburned. You look tired already. First day back? No.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

No. No. Back on Monday. I guess sunburn. It's been like busy, busy week since back from vacation. Did you say something? Are you frozen?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

This is going so well. I feel like we have a nice little lag. Yes. You know what? It's funny because we were both on vacation. And I think this is just telling you guys, just quit now, go back on vacation.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

I I would love to. I would love to quit forever and just go on forever vacation. That'd be great. I could do that. I could dig that full-time vacation mode.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

I think if I were to close my eyes right now, yeah, I think we'd be fine. But the fact that the video is lagging just a tad, I'm just getting delayed. My brain is not processing it.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

I mean, you look good.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

We're gonna be fine. We're gonna be fine. It's gonna go fine. Everything's gonna be great. Tell us about your vacation.

Beach Trip And Reading Moby Dick

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Where did you go? What did you do? How do you do?

SPEAKER_01 2:31

I and the wife went to our favorite beach in Florida. It's a little island to the east. Uh, I'm not gonna tell you what it is because then you'll go there and you'll ruin it for everybody. So it's just a secret. It's a secret. It's a secret, secret spot that we know that uh no one else is allowed to know because it's the best. There's just not a lot of people there. Crystal clear blue waters, wind, sun, waves, good food. It's so quiet and peaceful. It's great. I read like a hundred pages of Moby Dick. I'm like now 200 pages into Moby Dick. Uh it was a good time. It's a great time.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

You're a scholar. That's not an easy read.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

It's not, but it is fun. It's not an easy read, but it's a fun read. Like Moby Dick is, I'm gonna say the most like, please don't let the AI translate this. Do not repeat this, don't clip this, don't post this in the Discord. Moby Dick is like the dark souls of literature. And I think I just killed five people by saying that into the ether, but I enjoy the challenge of it. It is fun to read because it is a little bit more complex in its nature.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

You just broke like a cardinal rule in society of comparing something that's old time and classic to a new thing. You're you can't do that. You can't do that. It's a mistake.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Well, it's even worse because you're not a you're not an MLG pro gamer like I am. But one of the one of the things, one of the things like that really kind of became a taboo in gaming and games journalism and just games reporting is you have to stop calling things the dark souls of other things. Uh it was just like, this is this has been this horse be beat. And uh for me to say that out loud just offended so many people of different faiths, beliefs, cultures. It's great. It's great. It might be the most offensive thing I've ever said out loud. So Moby Dick, one more time for the people in the back. Moby Dick, the dark souls of literature.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Please tell me that you brought Moby Dick the massive physical book with you.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

How big is it? Give me a give me a size. Give me a size for the listeners. Oh, yeah, it's a thick boy. It's thick. Bringing that around is like you are sacrificing like a tenth of the weight in your suitcase if you bring that around anywhere with you.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

It's very difficult to read. Uh, not from I mean, yeah, it's there's there are parts of the book that are hard to actually comprehend and read because he goes into these weird little diatribes. I would say 75% of the book is actually not difficult to read. It's it's just verbose and it's kind of sometimes funny, sometimes fun, sometimes educational. And then he goes religious occasionally. I think it's very weird. But the book itself is difficult to read because it is legitimately like a quadruple pounder with cheese in width, and just holding it and reading it, the physical act of reading it is difficult on the body. So yeah, I was only able to get about a hundred pages down. I'd already read about a hundred pages, I got 100 more pages down uh at the beach, which I think is the perfect place to read Moby Deck, by the way. Um, but it was mostly because I could not hold the tome anymore. It was too hard, too hard to handle.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

So you were so you basically only stopped reading. Mentally, you could read more. Yes. The challenge was physically, the book was so heavy. That's correct. You literally couldn't hold nothing longer. Yeah, that's correct. Yes. Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Yes. Uh ironically, the book about a giant whale is also a giant whale. So that you know, just yeah, yeah. Layers.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Layers.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Good for you.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Sounds like a nice relaxing little beach weekend. Good for you. I'm happy for you.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Can I can I say something also incredibly offensive that will absolutely trigger some people? Yeah, are you ready? Are you ready?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

I feel like you can't say this to me because I have no idea what you're about to say. Cancel the whole podcast. It's simple.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Have you read Moby Dick? Moby hyphen dick. Have you read it?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

No, I know Captain Ahab.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Okay. I mean, so doesn't even show up to like 200 pages into the book. So uh as I was reading Moby Dick, and I've never read this before. I've never even seen like the movie. I don't know anything about it, other than Metal Gear Solid 5 was heavily influenced by it. So

The Surprise Politics Of A Classic

SPEAKER_01 6:59

I'm coming from that lens. And it I know our audience, I could say this. It is wild to me how woke Moby Dick is as a book. And I feel like if certain people read this book today, they'd be so triggered because this book is so like enlightened in its mentality and its position on very like not political issues that have become political issues. It's very funny to me. I'm just like, wow, what 1836? I think this is written. Like apparently people were more open-minded back then than they are in 2026. So just funny. Just a funny thing about Moby Dick. Didn't expect that. The biggest surprise in the book about a whale. Open-mindedness. Who knew?

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Huh. Whoever expected that, especially from a captain, you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Well, it it Ishmael is the main character. Call me Ishmael, first line of the book. He is not the captain. He is literally a man who thirsts for the sea and talks about his desire to be part of the sea for the first 30 pages of the book, determines he's going to join a whaling crew and does so around 150 pages in. So uh there is there's a lot of unpacking Ishmael as a character before you ever get to any actual whaling action.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Nice. Yeah. So given this as a corporate strategy podcast, it could have been an easy. What did you take away? What

Whaling Pay Structure As Business Lesson

SPEAKER_00 8:23

do you think the takeaways are from the readings you've done so far that could benefit you with B2B sales?

SPEAKER_01 8:29

So believe it or not, it's the book is actually very business oriented. Uh, they there's an entire chapter spent on discussing the two owners of the shipping company uh that are retired captains that basically found uh a legal monetary loophole that if they, as retired captains, stay ship owners and like pilots, they can waive certain tax fees. It's very important, uh, important part of the book, by the way. Uh so a big part of whaling is staffing the ship. And get this, get this, Michael. Back in the whaling days, uh, when you wanted to staff a ship, you uh what's the word they used? Lays, L-A-Y. So when you sign up, say, hey, I'm gonna be on the ship, I'm gonna be the ship's cook, they'd be like, okay, well, the ship's cook generally gets a 365 lay, which is basically the the higher your number, the less your take on whatever the outcome of this expedition is. So harpooners and people who are like really in the action, they get much lower lays, but much higher payouts. So what you bring to the expedition, what you sign in your entry-level contract, your your resume of whaling, as it were, bring your best and you'll get a light a lower lay, which means more pay. Lower the lay, higher the pay, as they say in the Moby way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

In the Moby way. That was great. Yeah, that was a good little backdrop. I appreciate you taking the expert out and just giving us a little bit of how to look at this from a business perspective.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Um, unfortunately, corporate has completely flipped this. And actually, the more involved you are in work, the probably the more people just use you to climb the corporate ladder, and you do get paid less than people who just use and abuse you.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Isn't that funny? And I mean, even back then, they still knew like the the ship owners because they're putting up the captain. Well, not even the captain. I mean, yeah, the captain has a very low lay, uh, but the ship owners themselves, like, oh yeah, I own the boat. Therefore, I should get the most money because without me, you don't get to go anywhere because I own the boat. Um, I mean, some things never change, Michael. But uh it is it is funny, like the when the the two primary characters in the first couple hundred pages of the book are Ishmael, who is the guy who's interested in going to the ocean, and Kuiqueg, who is a cannibal from an unnamed island, who is, you know, sort of like a mystical island person. We'll just refer to them as that. But they're very, very smart and talented and an excellent harpooner. So when the when the ship captains seequeg uh and they're like, hey, can you harpoon? He's like, Oh, can I? And then he jumps up on the boat and like throws his harpoon at like a target and like jumps and grabs it, and like this dude's like the Michael Jordan of whale pooning. And uh that he gets a very low lay by showing his skills. So, you know, there's just a lot to unpack there. A lot to unpack of the old Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Well, this has been our recurring segment of updates from Anthony and his reading of Moby Dick. So thank you. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

You're welcome. Maybe may maybe we'll do a spin-off podcast where I literally tell you the story of Moby Dick in my own words. I'm sure that'll be great. People will love it. Sign up. Patreon content.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

I'm sure people are just thrilled to hear the rest of this. So please, please keep it coming. Oh,

Product Manager Training Sparks The Topic

SPEAKER_00 12:06

well, we're back again. We are for once. For once, I put in the work, I came up with the topic. You did, and I'm so so happy. I get to let you announce what it is and kick us off.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Yes. So I'm really happy you came up with this topic because uh it it absolutely came from you, Michael. And I just want to stress exactly how you came up with this topic. So I'm uh going through Anthony that I didn't get this how you came up with this topic is so funny because I am currently going through product manager training, and I'm gonna get product manager certified, uh, mostly in spite of you, but uh also because hold on.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

This is Anthony coming to us telling us he is going to become a product manager. So let me just let me throw you throw out my feels for you really quick. I think this is my this is my hypothesis. You have become so spiteful of product management that you've decided to do it yourself. Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Does it does this surprise you at all? Does this surprise you in the slightest?

SPEAKER_00 13:17

I love this on so many levels. So you're you're becoming like a safe product owner, is that what it is? Well getting your your product owner, product manager.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

I'm getting my product manager certification. So uh I've I'm basically going through pragmatic, who I've done before for product marketing training. And uh I one of my goals for this quarter was I wanted to do some basically career growth education. And the only thing that I can't that I don't have that I need is strategy. Like I don't have the strategic brand. I'm very reactionary, I'm a firefighter, I'm always like reacting to things, but I don't have long-term planning. That's not on my, that's not on my skill set. So talking to folks, they're like, you should do product manager training because you know, that's all about strategy. And if you understand product management, then you've got the full set. You've got everything. The infinity gauntlet is yours, you snap your fingers, and every billionaire disappears. So I was like, well, that sounds great. Sign me up, I'll do it. Uh so I started doing some research. It's all pragmatic, who I've worked with, done trainings with before, do a PM certification. I started the training today, and it was so funny. I have to be careful what I say here so I don't incriminate myself. Uh, it was very funny because like the second I started going through this, just did the first hour, I'm like, oh my God, I've never actually met a good product manager in my life. Like every single thing, they're like, at the high level, the important thing about being a product manager is understanding the problem. And I'm like, my God, I don't know a single one that does. Like, where what? What is that? Are are is pragmatic wrong, or uh are every product manager I've ever worked with wrong? So it was very funny, but there was a point in the training uh that I was going through where they're talking about firefighting. And they're like, when you are a product manager that's constantly going and giving demos or doing sales presentations or going around and fighting fires, helping with support cases, uh, doing one-off development, you know, prioritizations for customers, you are not being strategic, which is exactly why I'm taking this course. So they're like, you know, don't be a firefighter, be a strategist focused on outward facing in market problems. And I'm like, I dig all of this. This all makes sense to me. I like this. But then it got me thinking, in general, I think it's very easy, like remove the product manager lens from this topic. But it's very easy in corporate to become a firefighter, which I am, or to become sort of a long-term strategy thinking individual. But I don't think you can actually be both. And that's kind of what Pragmatic was hinting at. They never said it outright, but like they were pushing towards the when you become a firefighter, basically, hey, he's really good at fighting that fire. He'd be great at fighting this fire too. And it it snowballs. So you're constantly responding to, well, let's sick Anthony on the problem because Anthony will be able to solve the problem kind of thing. And I thought that would be a really good topic to talk about on the pod, specifically because I think you and I have both been firefighters. But I think just what I know about you, I think you escaped firefighting and I became a full-time professional firefighter and have succeeded largely in my job because I'm a very good firefighter. But I think we should do pros, cons and talk about for freshers, specifically people young in their careers. What does that even mean? And what should you do? And how like, do you become a firefighter or do you avoid that entirely?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yeah.

The Five Whys Versus Firefighting

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Yeah, I think you know, it's so interesting when you when you say when you're talking about the training you're doing, like it brings me back to the core principles. And I would train my team on this. It's don't just act, don't just jump in, start acting. Like you have to ask the five whys until you truly understand.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Like explain the five whys real quick for for those that don't know.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Yeah, there the idea is you get back to first principles of like, why is this even a thing that's coming up? And so when a fire happens, like you have two choices. You can say, I'm gonna jump in right now, I'm gonna do what I think is best based on the context that I have, and you're potentially going to take the wrong steps, you're gonna potentially even solve the wrong problem. And so the five whys is kind of going back to first principles of saying, like, what is the purpose and objective of this type of request? Why is it an issue in the first place? You know, why is this person bringing it to me in this context? And yeah, why ultimately do I need to jump on this? What's the urgency? And so you can kind of just take a step back to say the five whys is just ask why five times. That's kind of the premise of it.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

And the idea is like ask why to the response of the previous why five times. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

So if someone comes at you and they're like, hey, I have this urgent like marketing thing has to be published at five o'clock. I need this now.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Why does it need to be published at five o'clock?

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah, like, okay, you know, why why doesn't this need to be published at five? Okay, we've got this campaign running. That is when our uh you know budget hits our account, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Uh I'm gonna say what, but what is this campaign you're running?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Yeah, and so this is where you can give the context to say, okay, this campaign we're running is because uh we're low on our sales number this month, and we're dumping a bunch more marketing dollars in because we think that will reach outbound customers.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Why are we low on our sales numbers this month?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

We're low in our sales numbers because we're off target because Q1 sales did not hit.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Why did Q1 sales not hit?

SPEAKER_00 19:00

And this is where you're really getting back to the crux of the problem. And this helps you understand okay, is it because now the the next natural responses will be well, you know, there's there was a forecasting issue. We forecasted too much. There's a market shift, meaning that people are no longer purchasing our product as much as they were, and we're actually being defeated in the market. And think about like what that just changed from. You went all the way from I thought I just needed to publish something at five because it was urgent, to oh, thanks for the thumbs up there, Mac. Appreciate that, to all the way back to, oh, we actually are losing to our competitors in the market. And really, what we should be putting our attention in is not pumping more dollars into a can a marketing campaign for our existing product. Really, what we should be doing is thinking about how do we better serve our customers? How do we build a better product, better service offering, whatever it is? So think about that. You know, you could have just gone and wasted time and gone and done this thing and then we wasted a bunch of marketing dollars. Rather, you went all the way back and you said, Hey, rather than investing a bunch of extra marketing dollars into existing products and services, why don't we look at building something else for our customer? And I think that not only is helping the company drive more value, but it's making sure at the root of it you understand the current context you're in so you can make better decisions as an employee.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

And I love that we just did this because the firefighter response is don't worry, I got you. I'm gonna get this thing posted by five today. And that's the Anthony way of doing things. The strategic is you get to the bottom of it and like, hey, there was a market shift. Posting at five is not gonna get you anything. What we need to do is we need to step back, evaluate why did the market shift? What's the new problem that we're looking to solve and build a potentially an entirely new campaign to sort of lean into and solution that market instead of just being rapid responding and thinking doing the same old thing is gonna fix the problem. I do, I do want to hit both of these responses, whether you're the firefighter or you're the strategist, they will get you points. So, like, I don't think doing either of those things hurts you from a career corporate perspective, monetarily, financially, growth-wise. But what I will say is being the firefighter will eventually burn you out and exhaust you, where being the strategist allows you to almost act with more grace in a ballet, right? Like you're able to move smoothly, gracefully, not swiftly, but with intention and have more data-driven results that are that are basically caused by the underlying or solved by the underlying problem versus just reacting and doing the thing when you're asked to do it.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's that's kind of the core. And actually, I think I'm gonna give the biggest pro T. I'm gonna thread the needle for you right now. The biggest way you can balance both, and this Is the extra context, too, of when someone asks you to do that, you need to understand who's asking and why do they think it's important. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, you're an employee who has to be a good soldier sometimes and just do what's being asked. But this is how you take it from just being reactive and tactical to now stepping into the strategic while also staying in the good graces. You say, hey, no problem. Like I understand the urgency. I'll go ahead and do it right now. However, I'm going to set up time with you just to talk to the strategy of maybe there's a better approach. Or you go to your manager and say, hey, this team reached out, you know, they need help doing this. Of course, you know, I help them. I'm always happy to do so. But it got me really thinking about is this the right approach? Is this the right strategy? And I started thinking about, okay, if it's truly we're losing in the market to our competitors, why don't we start looking at another product offer? Here are some ideas. And that's how you take it from just this tactical firefighting thing, or hey, I'm going to keep on asking five whys and I'm never going to get to actually any action to you did the action, you do what you were asked, but then you take it back to I'm going to be strategic and I'm going to show my leaders, my partners that I am a thought partner and a strategic leader and position yourself in a way that they look at you to say, this person really can make an impact in our business.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's that's a really big part of it. And as a fresher, fresher being someone who's younger in their career, sometimes it's better not to be strategic, I would say, right? I would it's it's better to be, hey, I'm willing to jump up and do the thing because I can and we'll get this done and I'll look really good for getting it done. But after doing that, the opportunity for you to then further follow up and say, hey, how did that post that I did at five o'clock today or five o'clock Monday, how did that go? Did it turn out well? Did it uh produce the results that you were expecting? And then kind of play the five Y's after the fact, force the conversation to happen, be like, oh, so no change, huh? Like, why do you think that is? Can we die? Like, maybe there's something else I can help with here. Can we dig deeper into it? You can do both. You can be a firefighter and then be strategic about it. But the caution, and this is the same caution I got today, is like when you firefight, when you become that reactive person, people just they they lean on you because they know you will. Uh, because not everyone has that capability to just jump whenever they're told to.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's such a hard balance, is especially especially balancing. You don't want to be annoying. Like you can't just keep on asking five whys and then take five hours to do the fire, right? Like it's burning down the house, like you got to do it right now. You can't just like be asking why and be like, why? Well, it's like ask informed questions. And if they're like, listen, especially if it's your boss, it's urgent. I need you to do it now. The answer is not five whys. The answer is do the thing now, and then afterwards try to follow up, like you said, of being like, hey, you know, I did this, I'm just trying to understand the bigger picture. Like, what were we really trying to do? And that just shows that you are willing to think beyond what's asked of you. I think you do get caught in the trap of being the go-to person. Yes. And that's a tough one because I I work with a lot of people now where I know the go-to people, and how you get stuff done is you go to the go-to people. And I've seen people build careers off going to the go-to person. However, I think I think it's just really important that we try to provide some tips of like how do you get out of that and get to a place where you can balance the strategic part as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

So,

The Tactical To Strategic Ratio

SPEAKER_01 25:31

and this is this was gonna be the second part of the pod. So I'm glad you went here because this is actually a two-parter. Uh, I figured we'd get to this first part of the conversation fairly quickly. So, you, as someone who's done a lot of product management and are more strategic, is there a golden number for you that is tactics to strategy percentage of your day? And when I say tactics, I don't mean like email. I mean tactics is like doing an RFP for a customer, uh, you know, doing a webinar, the little things, little, little chunks that you know build up to perhaps being part of a strategy versus actually sitting down doing the thought work on, hey, what is our plan for next year look like? What are we building next year? What does the market look like? Doing market research, like tactics v strategy, what's the golden ratio? Tell me, Michael. I need to know. I my promotion depends on it.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

You, in fact, may benefit the most from this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

This is not a topic for our listeners. This is a topic for me. Please tell me. What do I need to do? How do I save myself?

SPEAKER_00 26:44

To be honest with you, I think I think this depends on the state of the business that you're in. If you are in a place where your product is thriving, especially from a product manager perspective, and you're a growth product manager, not a not like a tactical boots on the ground product owner working with the dev team, I think the ratios are very different. But I always would tell my team, like that we're doing product ownership, sitting with developers all day long, like trying to get them everything they need, is they really need to shift to being 40% tactical, 60% strategy, talking to customers, truly understanding the problem. And I think that's, or the business objective, right? I think that's the hardest thing to balance because when you're a day-to-day product owner, you have a whole team of people that rely on you, potentially multiple teams, right? Like, what are my requirements? Hey, I just thought of an edge case when I was developing this that we didn't talk about. Can we have five minutes of chat? Your whole day does get consumed with all the other pieces of work, and that's why I go back to it depends on your company maturity, but also your team maturity. Because I think if you are able to build and encourage a more mature mindset with the development team, you actually can get out of the tactical pretty easily. So, like if you empower a dev team, if you have senior engineers on there, they know they can take abstract ideas and turn it into how do I actually accomplish this? They don't need somebody guiding them. If it's a junior dev team that you're working with, they're gonna need hand holding and you're gonna be stuck in the weeds there, like feeding them each thing piece by piece by piece. But I think how you get out of that is you start to empower them and be like, hey, this seems really similar to that last test we did. Like, why don't you take a stab at like breaking down what stories you might want in order to develop this? Because I did not do my the best job on it last time. I know it was a little bit of a pain in the butt for you to update seven tickets instead of the three. So that's how you kind of empower your team to get out of the weeds of it. You say, hey, anybody can create stories, not everybody can go and talk to customers and understand the business objective or the problem and really try to get down to first principles of like, why is this important and what should we build to you know get better in the market, grow revenue, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

So I like that. And I think to generalize it even more, because you're you're coming at it from like a product management perspective, but I think you could take what you just said and apply it basically to any job, any corporate job that exists, right? Because there are the tactics of if I'm a manager, I got to make sure my team's doing what they need to be doing, I got to make sure, you know, pay is squared away, you know, vacations, time off, expenses, all of the managerial tactics that just pop up that I need to do because it's my job to do them. But then there's the long-term strategy, right? Hey, I've got a teammate who's really like going above and beyond. Like strategically, I would love to see them in a higher level position where they're they're driving more strategy. So, how do I, as their manager, help guide them into that next step? So, like that's a little bit of strategic thinking and planning. You might come up with a career growth plan or something, or reach out to HR and come up with something like that. But I think it also applies to the individual contributor as well. It could be in development, you could be in marketing, you could be in finance. Your tactics are the things that you kind of have to do to keep the bills getting paid, right? It's the, hey, go review this uh code check-in, go approve this latest round of expenses that are coming through, uh, you know, go deal with these HR cases. Like it's the day-to-day sort of minutiae that make up your job. But the strategy part might just be, hey, how do I, you know, the individual contributor, either escalate what I'm doing or elevate what I'm doing to a more strategic level that I get people underneath me, or move into a more purely strategic role where I'm not just doing the minutiae. I'm helping plan how we minimize the minutiae and optimize our long-term effectiveness in this department. And I like, I don't know what that golden ratio is. I like I asked in Jess, but I'll honestly, I really don't know what the best like 50% tactics, 50% strategic. I don't think that'll work. I don't think there's enough time in most of our day-to-day job lives to actually make that work. I think it's 75% tactical, 25% strategy, but make time for that strategy, right? Because that's really where you can grow as an individual, you can grow your team, or you could grow your company if that is your focus. Like you can help make your company more successful and better. But it never comes from the tactics. It comes from being informed, understanding your problems, and coming up with solutions that impact over the long term.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Yeah. I think the the thing I'll say about that is it does take conscious effort to shift that percentage.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

And like think about it this way: let's say you're building an invoicing system and you run like an IT service desk, like you're a help desk person, right? Sure, you can just fix the invoicing problem every time it pops up, right? So a ticket comes up, you go into the database, you update the system, whatever, you send a new invoice. You can do that for the rest of time if you wish. However, it's probably better that you start asking the questions like, why is this still broken? How do we fix it? How do I make sure I stop dealing with these tickets over and over and over again? And I think in every single line of work, every single position, there are things like that that you can say, we have a monthly release that we do. I need to prep the demo, I need to prep the UAT. And like look at your work in that way of saying, what are the recurring patterns that I see? Now, what are the recurring activities in order to prepare for that thing or fix that thing or whatever it is? And then you kind of think a little bit further ahead to be like, hey, I'm gonna schedule the next three months of meetings today, or I'm gonna schedule a recurring on the second Wednesday, a time for me to do that, and then I'm gonna put a to-do on my to-do list for the week before to make sure that I have time to you know prep the material. And so, like when you think that step ahead, you aren't just like, oh shoot, we got a demo today. I got to prep everything like right now. You can be strategic to say, oh, it's on my calendar. That's right, I got to prep for the demo next week. It's already there. Like I got the time blocked, I'm just gonna make sure that I do it. And that stops the burnout from happening because you're able to proactively set yourself up for success with the recurring tasks, with the recurring outputs, and making sure that you're planning so that way when you step into a week, you know what to expect. You're not fighting fires 24-7. And I saw this um, you know, when I was at Universal, I started off on a tactical 150% of my time, right? As a small team fighting fires over and over and over again. At year eight, you know, before I left, I had a whole entire team that I put in strategic effort to grow them, to train them, to do all the things that I used to do. And my team was relatively large. And so when fires came up, I was never involved anymore, right? And so I spent probably 80, 20, 80% of my time with strategy. 20% was actually tactical working with people on like real problems. But it went from 150% tactical all the time working overtime to 80% strategy, 20% uh tactical at the end of it, which I think tactical is unavoidable, but you can make strategic effort to get into the more of the strategy pieces where you're not just chasing your tail or fighting the latest fire.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

I completely agree. I did this today, believe it or not. And it like maybe it was partly because of the training that I went through, but I was I actually went and thought, like, hey, instead of me doing this thing, which I always do every couple of months, because you know, I work on hardware, a hardware product, especially in our current industry with AI bubble, uh supply chain shortages. Hardware is funky right now. Like you can order something that might not ship for nine months. So you have to be resilient, you have to be able to sort of respond to that and be clever in how you deal with it. So, as a marketer, as a marketer of hardware, it's very difficult to be consistent when the hardware can change at a moment's notice. And like it hit me. I was like, wait a second, I'm I'm doing all this tactical response to supply chain shortage when I could be building something that actually is a system that makes it very easy to respond to these changes that'll cut down the actual amount of work that all of us have to do tremendously. Uh, and then it's almost an idea that's as simple as just coming up with better naming systems for things and how we group and sort of set things up. And that was that was me taking a moment to be like, hey, instead of just doing this again, like let's let's figure out what the core of the problem is that we're trying to solve. And then how can we go and build something that's not just response based, but it's more process-oriented, it's information driven, and it will lead to less churn and change over time. A little bit of tactics, a little bit of strategy. And tactics can inform strategy.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Yeah, absolutely. I

Build Systems Process Then Automate

SPEAKER_00 35:41

think it's it's kind of a it's a a ladder of changes. Like the first, if you're a fresher, I think the first way to look at it is understand the type of work and why it fits into the bigger picture. The second thing to try, after you have an understanding, right? You have it in your head, you have a documented whatever. Now you're not just firefighting, you understand the context, you understand where it comes from. And the next step is you actually need to put together a process to make it easier for yourself. Whether it's you know you have this meeting every month, you got to prep on this date. So put something on your calendar so that way you know what to expect. Put some notes to remind you like what output you need to create. For for the one that you just mentioned, it's like you can go in, even if it's performance reviews for your team or whatever it is, it's like you can go in and make sure that every month you take 30 minutes on your calendar and like be like, review their work, go into Jira, check their stories, review their output, whatever it is. And I think getting into a process is kind of the next level. Then it's kind of the okay, it's in a process. How can we improve it? So understand, put a process around it, then think about how do we improve and optimize. And that's when I think you get to the final level. And I think this is the head exploding, the strategy brain, galaxy brain type thinking. It's how do you actually take a step forward to be proactively anticipating the next thing that's coming your way? So if you have like one weekly release and you know you're always prepping every Monday, you're getting ready for the release or whatever it is, how do you actually take a step back to say, what if I could automate this using AI, having it look at our Jira stories, and it just puts it together and emails it out for me every single week. Now you just saved yourself even more time while still, you know, conquering the objective that you used to do manually. So I think that's like the last Galaxy brain piece is anticipating what's coming next, using tools and things like AI to help you accelerate it.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Well, and I think what you just said is what even Pragmatic, the great trainers at Pragmatic haven't really quite maybe they get to it later in the course, but you know, they their core circle is problem, right? Like if you if you can identify the problem, then you're able to operate in a better mindset for building up strategy and being less tactical and being sort of more problem-oriented outside in. But I think if you take problems and you look at them as opportunities, that's really your galaxy brain, to your point, right? Because hey, a problem is just an opportunity that hasn't been solved yet. And when you can look at a problem strategically and solve it, that problem converts into opportunity, which leads to data, which leads to input-output, which leads to more problems to solve, more opportunities to grow, which is good for you, your team, your company, whatever you want to focus on.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Right. You know, it's funny, I can kind of put this in my I can line up every job in my career to doing this and how I landed in product management. Because one of my first jobs was doing business sales at Apple. And I would get constant, I would constantly get the same complaints like, hey, this software sucks. This piece of hardware never works, like when we operate at scale or when we link everything together. So my natural train of thought is like, okay, like I want to understand more of the problem. And so I went into the support aspect and I did some Apple Care stuff. And it's like, hey, this software still sucks. These are the reasons it sucks. And but now I'm getting started with some of the details, right? I'm just getting the tactical details of like, okay, this is why it sucks, this is why it doesn't work. So then I bridged into software engineering and I was like, okay, now I can build stuff to be better quality, to be better for customers, and to have a better product at the end of the day. And then I started stepping into, okay, well, why are we building this stuff? Why does it matter? Like, why do people even care? Right. And that's how I found product management. And then I kind of went into the strategy and consulting side, which I do now, where it's like, I want to help businesses and people who are trying to solve hard problems, be able to figure out the best way to do that, leveraging the latest technology. And so that's like the one step ahead. If they come and they explain what they're doing, I'm like, have you thought about using this instead? Or have you thought about approaching the problem with this way with this tool? Here's how you can use agents to like orchestrate your workflows to make them more deterministic and in quality. And so I think that's like, as I ladder my career, I think it's just been laddering up to that level of how I can get into the more strategic thinking and using that as leverage rather than the tactical day-to-day. However, I would say a lot of my day right now is definitely more tactical. Have you ever kind of regressed?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Michael, have you ever considered that maybe you are the problem?

SPEAKER_00 40:12

I've never looked that deep, but you might be right. At the end of the day, I'll go so far that I'll then look in internally, intrinsically, and I'll realize that I'm the core issue.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

You from the very start, from the very beginning. You were the problem. And you solved yourself. What a journey. What a journey you've gone on.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

This is this is what happened with Ishmael at the end of the book.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Actually, I have a feeling it is going that direction. When we do our Moby Dick Abridge series, uh, I'll make sure to uh call back to this episode so we can see that you were right.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Yeah, but it's it's a great discussion because I do think you get trapped in the tactical, and sometimes you're so busy in the tactical you don't even have time to think about what's next. But here's a tip I'll give you not everything can be urgent and important. And so you need to make the time to take that next step of the ladder. And if if you don't, you will be stuck in that trap forever, you'll burn out, you'll hate what you're doing. Like the only way to bring some sanity is to climb the ladder, get into a spot where you're spending more time strategically so you can anticipate these problems and opportunities that come up. And that will make you more valuable in any position you're in, in any job you take.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

Yeah, I I want to add to that because if everything is urgent and everything is important, you have an unidentified problem that you need to do the five wise exercise on. Uh lived it, been there, experienced it, will probably live it and experience it for the rest of my life. But that over urgency is typically the result of an undiagnosed problem that you do need to be strategic on.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Yep. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. So thank you. If you're long-term, I did. But I really want you to take some time to really look at the way you work and like just analyze it. Don't just go through the steps, don't go through the motions, especially if you're if you hate your job, if you're getting tired with it. Like, there's you can do something. You're in full control to do something right now to hopefully make an impact.

Discord Is It AI Challenge

SPEAKER_00 42:21

And if you want even further tips, if you want to give us more context, join our Discord and we'll help you out.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

That's right. Hey, it's really easy to do nowadays because all you got to do is if you're watching on YouTube, you go into the little description. If you're listening to your podcast, you go into your show notes and there's a link tree right there, right at the top, uh right below the Patreon link, which is the most important link. But right below that is the Discord link. You gotta click it. You gotta join our community because it's great. Uh, it's so great. In fact, uh Michael has now created this problem child, which is the is it AI challenge? And I do want to spend just five minutes talking about the latest problem you've introduced with with the latest is it AI? So for those of you who are not in our Discord, stop, pause, pause the episode, go join our Discord right now, go to the Is It AI channel and please look at what's in there and then resume viewing uh Michael. You can't just post a picture in the is it AI channel that is an AI taking a picture that already exists and remaking that picture. That is cheating. Because one, yeah, yeah, one of them is AI, but it's AIing a real thing, and you didn't give me enough pixels. I need more pixels. I can't make a determined I can't. I I mean you're you're just asking me to like robot brain this thing. I can't do that. That's not fair.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

This is the ultimate test of if we are human or not. Can we prove can AI perfectly recreate an image? You know what's interesting to doing this one, and this is why I wanted to do it. One of these is 100% real, a photo taken by. A person. One is completely so what I did in this process I thought was really interesting. I started one AI chat, I gave it a real image, and I said, Hey, explain this image in words for an AI to recreate this image. Do not spare any detail about size, colors, anything like that. So I gave it a good prompt. And then I took it to a separate AI engine and I gave it the prompt and it created one.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

It's very good.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

Is that insane?

SPEAKER_01 44:24

It's very good. No, it's uh, I think you did the right thing. You did the right thing. So kudos to you. Uh, the wrong thing was uploading it like 480p resolution. So I have to like, I'm I'm I'm pouring over pixels here, and it very clearly the AI AI steals. We've established this. It very clearly stole like the scratch marks are the same on both. It's like, dude, you just stole this picture. You didn't create nothing. This is stolen.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

But that's what's crazy. It didn't have the image, it was a totally different AI engine.

SPEAKER_01 45:01

Oh, I just noticed.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

Just using words.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

I think I you think you cracked the case in real time? I think I cracked the case in real time. Uh I know which one's AI now. Okay, there is there is one thing that is very obvious that I missed. And I feel like if you clicked on the wrong one, you missed it. But now I can't unsee it. So I think I got it. I think I got it. But I'll we'll find out. We'll find out next time on Dragon Ball Z. So if you haven't joined our uh Is It AI channel, do so. Join our Discord, join the join the channel, do your votes, and then on the next episode, because no, well, next episode won't be August yet. But on our first August episode, Michael, we'll unveil the truth and we will know what the AI

Share Support And Closing

SPEAKER_01 45:48

was. Hey, if you like what you heard and uh you want to be a friend to us, we love friends and we'd love it if you shared this podcast with your friends, your family, your neighbors, and your coworkers. Uh, believe it or not, sharing this podcast with people you work with is a great way to help everyone succeed together. Um, fun fact it's happened at my work. People have like reached out and be like, hey, I listened to your episode. I'm like, you know I had a podcast. Like, oh yeah, your co-worker shared. I'm like, weird, but cool. So uh you can absolutely share it with your coworkers. They might find more value than you do. It's a good thing to do. And also, if you don't want to share, you can help us financially. We are completely independently funded. We have no ads, we have no sponsors, uh, we have a Patreon. And for a dollar or $10 a month, you can support us either smallly or bigly. We don't judge and we love you for it. And there is exclusive Patreon content that is just for you, the sponsors, that'll be there forever. But also, there's more content coming. I promise one of these days, I'm not on vacation, I will get my uh how to tell stories and and be a public speaker presentation up there. So you can you too can be a master, storyteller, and presenter. And Michael will do something. I'm I'm sure. Just give him time. He's he's cooking, let him cook. Uh support the support the show, join the Discord, tell your friends. I think that's all we got. Uh until next time, because we never did intros, and you're just getting to know who we are. Uh, I'm Anthony.

SPEAKER_00 47:19

And I'm Michael.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

And you're on mute. We will see you next week.